Re:Show HN: My Hacker News clone (redesigned)
by karmakaze on Saturday May 08, 2021 @11:00PM
(#27092827)
Most of my devices don't notice page load times.
Information density it really what it's all about. The very idea of HN is high signal-to-noise. Don't confuse text density with information density though.
If I visit HN twice in one day, or even once each on consecutive days, I'll see the same stories there. Of course if not there I might miss a top headline if I go a day without a visit. My solution[0] was to only show today's stories. For yesterday's, click the page title. It also segments into categories based on some regexes.
I don't mean to hijack this post. The design is quite different and may suit some readers. I was only giving an example of information density which happens to save me a lot of time to see that there's nothing new since the last time I visited.
HN loads very fast, and scanning the list of posts is very fast. The information-dense design is important. On my phone, on the original site, I see 8 posts by default. On this redesign, I see 2.
Every single HN redesign I’ve seen makes it slower and less information dense. And sometimes requires JavaScript to work at all. Why?